July 25, 2014

Scandalous behavior

Via Truth Revolt, the growing political myopia of president Obama is apparently contagious among some Hollywood liberals. Shonda Rhimes, producer of the show Scandal, holding fundraiser for president Obama at her home (as he traipses around the country raising money for not-another-run-for-president, while a number of crises erupt both at home and abroad), failed to see the scandal beginning to engulf the president's disinterest in the apparent emergencies.

As President Obama arrives in Los Angeles for his $32,000 per plate fundraiser at the home of Shonda Rhimes this week, a local street artist is pointing out the irony of the producer of the hit TV show Scandal, a show about a Washington public relations firm that specializes in managing political scandals, hosting the producer of such actual scandals as the cover-up surrounding the Benghazi attack, the lost hard-drives of IRS officials targeting conservatives, and the Fast and Furious gun running scheme.

Posters went up Monday night all over Hollywood around Rhimes's Hancock Park home and the Sunset Gower Studios where Scandal is filmed.

The posters feature a modified version of the Scandal logo, which now reads “Scandals” and a quote from Rhimes's infamous commencement speech at Dartmouth where she urged graduates, “Don’t be an asshole.” The artist added a hashtag to the epithet in a seeming nod to another part of Rhimes's speech in which the producer called out online social movements like Michelle Obama's #SaveOurGirls as being faux-activism. “A hashtag is not a movement,” Rhimes declared.

Now her show has been brought into the discussion. Her own political myopia is not likely to have an impact on her show. But perhaps even without that, drawing some attention to it might shake her out of it.